UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Alexander Ororbia, a doctoral candidate in the College of Information Sciences and Technology, has received a graduate fellowship from The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, under the University Centers of Exemplary Mentoring (UCEM) program. The UCEM fellowships provide stipend support and professional development to under-represented minority graduate students in STEM fields.
In 2013, Penn State was one of three flagship universities selected by The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the UCEM initiative, which builds on Penn State’s Bunton-Waller assistantship program.
“I am greatly honored to receive the Sloan Foundation Fellowship,” said Ororbia. “It will provide me with additional resources to reach even greater heights in my graduate work.”
Ororbia’s research interests include Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and crowdsourcing. He has published on Big Data, search engines, neural networks, and crowdsourcing, and recently presented his research at the European Conference European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (2015, Porto, Portugal) and at the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (2015, Lisbon, Portugal.)
The costs of travel and conference attendance can often be prohibitive for graduate students, limiting the chances of both funding and sharing their work. “With the support from the Sloan Foundation Fellowship, I can now focus on my research agenda with confidence--without the financial worries and limitations of not being able to afford full participation at top-tier international conferences.”
“Penn State has never limited my potential based on my background or my ethnicity,” said Ororbia. “I believe that Penn State’s extensive policies in support of ethnic and cultural diversity make it a premier university at the forefront of the global citizenship of the future.”
Penn State’s commitment to diversity includes housing a multicultural director in each academic college and the graduate school, who work to support, promote and ensure the success of minority students.
“As proud as I am of my Hispanic heritage, I am even prouder to be part of a university that has offered me great opportunities solely on the merits of my character, knowledge, and will to succeed,” Ororbia said.